Ashley Smith

Senior Structural Engineer, with more than 36 years’ experience in New Zealand, the UK, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and PNG. I have led the structural team on multiple high-rise and long-span structures including buildings, sculptures and stadia.

I provide strategic advice to architects, developers, building owners and managers and contractors around how to set up their building design to ensure it meets their needs. If you’re looking for strategic structural engineering input you’ll benefit from my vast experience and knowledge of what the most efficient way to organise a structure to achieve a specific set of objectives is.

I also manage our structural engineering team, design the structures for new buildings and assess and strengthen existing ones.

My approach is to begin projects without a preconceived view of how things should be done, instead ensuring I understand the owner and architects specific objectives for that project. I then provide advice around how best to organise the structure to suit that.

You can expect openmindedness and teamwork - everyone has different knowledge and experience and I believe in leveraging this to get the right outcome. I will help to steer you in the right direction and will deliver technically. You can be confident that my team’s structural solutions are both feasible and efficient and that we can solve original challenges with no precedent. For example, we are currently designing the structure for a 100m long sculpture that can only be supported in the middle. When placed at Gibbs Farm it needs to look like it’s fallen into position.

Work highlights have included:

The Rita Flyn Netball Centre, a $30m international level facility with seating capacity for 3,000 people, developed for the 2015 Pacific Games held in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. We were involved right from the outset and agreed with the architect how to best set up the structure before he had developed his designs, important given that his vision was to make the structure part of the architecture. We delivered good documentation and the project ran smoothly.

Century Tower in Tokyo. Norman Foster was the architect and his outstanding design meant we had to design a huge floor area without any columns. The structural skeleton was to be exposed and needed to look great as well as perform in the event of an earthquake.

The Vero Centre. This iconic Auckland landmark continues to perform well and has no trouble attracting high calibre tenants.

Interests:

I recently completed my first triathlon and hope to do more in future. I was a rowing coach for many years while my kids were growing up. Now they’ve left home my wife and I are rediscovering ourselves.